Brief Overview of Theism:

Creation as a Representation of the Divine

These days we hear so many stories about science and religion. As well,
we have our own feelings and intuitions about what is true.

We hear, for instance, from religion that 'Love makes the
world go round', 'God is Love', 'God is personal' or 'God transcends personhood',
and 'the One True Religion is of Universal Love'.

We hear, for instance, from scientists that science is the attempt
to determine the natural laws that govern our world, and science makes
no reference to love in determining what 'makes the world go round'.

We hear, for instance, from advocates of the New Age, that we
are 'heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look
more like a great thought than a great machine' [James Jeans], 'we have
dreamed the world'.

How do we draw all these strands together? (insofar as they are true,
of course!).

We are fortunate that Swedenborg has given us the basic ideas necessary
for us to do just that. He has tried to convey to us how

everything in the world is created and activated by Love,

there can be a resulting universe with orderly and lawful progressions through
discrete degrees,
and

that in this physical world we must perhaps expect the surprises and perplexities
of modern quantum physics.

What are these basic ideas?

I state them now for reference, but we will come back to them in many ways:

That all life, loves, and all natural dispositions derive from the Divine
Love, (details)

that which life and dispositions we have, are Divine Love limited in accordance
with our actual history. (details)

Notice that I am not saying that the Divine Source produces all
physical effects directly, but that it produces (natural) dispositions,
and it is these dispositions (e.g. causes, forces, potentials, quantum
propensities etc.) which lead to the ultimate physical events and interactions.
Thus we have the picture so far:

In fact, dispositions do not spontaneously produce effects on their
own, but only in suitable circumstances.

Examples of dispositions in physics:

If a glass is fragile, that does not mean that it is always breaking, only
that if hit suitably, then it will break.

Newton's law of gravitation does not mean that the sun attracts just those
planets now present: Newton's law implies also that if there are new planets
or comets, then these will also be attracted.

Dispositions always have this 'if .. then ..' feature (details).
They usually depend on spatial relations for their operation, so we can
extend our above picture:

Here I have tried to represent the fact that 'dispositions operate by
means of spatial relations to produce effects'.

This may seem a rather obvious thing to say, but now we come to important
point (2.) of Swedenborg's: that which life and dispositions we have, are
Divine Love limited in accordance with our actual history.

I haven't said much about Divine Love so far in this talk, not least
because that Love is Infinite, Unconditioned, Indefinable and Absolute.
It seems presumptuous, to say the least, to even suggest putting it into
a (small!) box in my diagrams above!

But Swedenborg as shown us how we can at least have some about Divine
Love: we can at least say how it appears to us, and what it does on some
occasions. And he has given us the means to think about that Love, by the
principle of correspondences.

Correspondences arise because of the point (2.) just mentioned. Because
physical dispositions are a very limited 'remnant' of Divine Omnipotence',
they operate in a way that corresponds to the characteristic operation
of Divine Love. Correspondences are a kind of 'As above, so below' principle.

Correspondences are very useful to us, because we can use them to give
definite and permanent form to our ideas of Love (which is otherwise such
a vague and nebulous subject). For now, for example, we can represent
the religious idea that the Divine Love operates by means of Divine
Wisdom, to produce an outgoing Spirit. This corresponds to the pattern
in the physical world where Physical Dispositions operate by means of Spatial
Relations to produce physical effects, and should not be surprising if
the dispositions are essentially derived from Divine Love.

'dispositions operate by means of spatial relations to produce effects'.

How do we fit into this scheme ourselves? What about our own loves, our
own thoughts, and our own actions?

If we reflect on the causes which lead us to think and act as we do,
we see that some love or other is at the very root of these causes and
motivations. So much so that we could agree with Swedenborg when he says
that love is our very being and our life. Our central love is that
set of spiritual dispositions, by virtue of which we act as we do in the
various circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Because our love lends to many different affections and actions in different
circumstances, it is not a simple thing. We may never know all its details,
but we can understand how our own love operates. Indeed, it is our responsibility
to learn how own loves operate, if we are to lead useful or even sensible
lives! Now, any love can only act properly if it knows its own circumstances
accurately, and can understand the consequences of its own actions. We
can summarize this by saying (again!) that 'our loves operate by means
of knowledge, to produce our actions'.

Our personal loves are again essentially derived from the Divine Love,
in accordance with our personal character that has been built up as we
have actually acted in the past. It may seem surprising to us, but
Swedenborg emphasizes how all our life, loves and dispositions are
derived from the Divine Source in this way: there is no other Source of
life and existence. We now have the more detailed picture:

'our loves operate by means of knowledge, to produce our actions', and

'dispositions operate by means of spatial relations to produce effects'.

At the risk now of too much complication, I would like to represent Swedenborg's
more complete picture, with a 'Soul' stage that provides the 'invisible'
loves for the more 'visible' affections and knowledges in our minds:

Here I have tried to represent the corresponding facts that

'Divine Love operates by means of Divine Wisdom to produce Divine Spirit',
and

Our whole person consists of our soul and mind and body, and their relations
with each other are a (simplified!) representation of how the Divine Love
and Wisdom and Spirit are related. Not only this, but each of the soul
and mind and spirit are themselves a representation of the Divine Trinity.
There is even evidence from developmental psychology that our individual
'boxes' above also contain a threefold structure.

Don't ever imagine that the Divine is simple: it may be a perfect whole,
but it is not a featureless and simplistic unity! In fact the Divine is
Infinite: if this is not to be a mere honorific term, the Divine must contain
infinite things within Itself!

Thus there are everywhere in creation representations of the essential
Divine character, because created objects are all limitations and derivations
of the Divine Life according to all the different actual circumstances
that exist in the world.